Western Digital is buying flash storage vendor Tegile

Western Digital is acquiring Tegile Systems, a company specializing in hybrid and all-flash storage arrays for enterprise customers, for an undisclosed amount.

“The addition of Tegile’s technology and talented team will advance our goal of solving customers’ most significant challenges in capturing, preserving, transforming and accessing data,” said Mike Cordano, president and chief operating officer of Western Digital.

“We welcome the Tegile team to Western Digital and look forward to working together to enhance our leadership position in enterprise and cloud-based storage.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the beginning of September.

Western Digital previously participated as the lead investor in Tegile’s Series E funding round in April 2017.

Single origin storage

Tegile was established in 2010 - one of its early innovations was the ‘metadata acceleration engine’ that could improve the performance of traditional spinning disk media at a minimal cost.

Hybrid and all-flash storage arrays made by Tegile rely on high endurance enterprise-grade NAND memory from SanDisk (itself acquired by Western Digital in 2015), made more affordable by proprietary data management and compression algorithms, which help cram more data into SSDs.

The advanced features of Tegile’s arrays are powered by its own software platform called IntelliFlash. In the past few years, the company has successfully leveraged IntelliFlash to expand into NVMe storage and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions.

In September, the company will become part of Western Digital’s Data Centre Systems (DCS) business unit, where its arrays will complement the existing ActiveScale products.

“We are excited to add this team of deeply experienced storage professionals to Western Digital,” said Phil Bullinger, Western Digital’s senior vice president and general manager of the DCS business.

“Not only will we gain an exceptional group of team members, but also expand our product offerings in the fast-growing solid-state and hybrid array segments. By combining Tegile’s innovative storage system software with Western Digital’s global scale and combination of components and systems, we expect DCS to capture a sizable share of flash array demand.”